Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change (MoEFCC) launched the The National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) in 2019 with an aim to go on till the year 2024, loomed large over the then newly elected government’s policy landscape. This piece here sheds light upon the flaws and the opportunities that were missed in the NCAP and suggestive reforms for the same.

Flaws
NCAP was a missed opportunity to outline a systematic strategy. Beyond the national outreach and the reduction targets, it is a compilation of ongoing efforts and leaves the details of new efforts to future action plans. Specific gaps include

• NCAP is largely a continuation of the traditional policy approach of developing long lists of unprioritized action points. It does not put implementation capacity at the heart of designing our mitigation policies, thus risking no implementation.
   
• The program is urban-centric, focusing on a limited group of cities, and following the National Capital Region template by relying on city action plans. However, air pollution is not restricted to cities, and air quality in cities is typically influenced significantly by sources from outside. Addressing this problem requires moving the conversation towards addressing pollution at regional ‘airshed’ levels, and having a more flexible system boundaries for air pollution control. The NCAP does not outline a road map for defining these airsheds and developing processes that cut across jurisdictions and departments.
   
• NCAP misses addressing governance gaps directly. It introduces new committees at the central and state levels and declares that individual ministries will ‘institutionalize’ action points in their charge. However, it does not specify what institutionalizing entails, and who would be held responsible if targets are not met, and what legal or financial implications would follow.

To strengthen the NCAP, there is a need to focus efforts on a prioritized shortlist of solutions in the short term, improve the enforcement of the capacity of the PCBs while increasing their accountability, and begin extensively consultations about governance reforms needed in the longer term.
Some of the suggestive reforms can be –

Prioritizing concrete actions- Prioritizing solutions need active consideration of the implementation capacity needed to introduce measures and enforce them. In addition, we need to ensure that the program does not adversely impact vulnerable groups. In particular, with dispersed sources of pollution, such as transportation, households, waste burning, and construction dust, administrative solutions that require monitoring and enforcement are likely to fail.

Instead, enforcement could work better for policy changes targeted at higher, more centralized levels, where possible. For instance, with vehicles, although there is a pollution control mechanism in place, several issues inhibit inspections from being a reliable way to keep the on-road fleet within standards. These include low rates of compliance among vehicle owners in getting tested and compromised inspections.

Policy changes aimed higher up in the manufacturing process, such as the requirement to comply with Bharat Stage VI norms are likely to be better implemented. Keeping these factors in mind, two key priority areas within the NCAP are identified below.

• Power plant emission norms:
  India’s formal regulatory infrastructure has traditionally focused on ‘point sources’, with good reason. Industries and power plants burning coal are the second and third largest sources in India (only behind the numerous but highly dispersed household sources of emissions), in terms of contributions to average national exposure to air pollution and the resultant burden of disease.
  
  Power plants are the largest source of sulfur dioxide and a major source of nitrogen oxide. Sulfur and nitrogen oxides are key precursors that react with other substances to produce secondary particulate matter. MoEFCC introduced new emissions standards for power plants in 2015, which required the installation of pollution control equipment. Although the power plants were required to comply with these standards by 2017, the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) later announced that the compliance date had been pushed to 2022, as per a timeline prepared by the Central Electricity Authority.
   
• Invest in public transportation:
  Reducing transportation emissions would require a combination of ensuring easy access to affordable public and non-motorized transport, while simultaneously working on reducing emissions from the vehicles on the road. Investments in clean public transport can reduce transport emissions as well as make mobility easier and cheaper, thereby improving the quality of life in cities. Planning the public transit strategy for the long term is key.

Do we need to strengthen the regulations?

Clearly yes. The formal air pollution regulatory architecture in India is built around the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986 and Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1981. As per existing law, the state PCBs have very limited flexibility to take action proportional to the polluting activity. Currently, they can send show-cause notices, shut down industries through a closure notice or by shutting access to utilities, cancel regulatory consents, or initiate criminal prosecution by taking the industries to court.

With court cases taking several years to reach any meaningful conclusion, PCBs rarely pursue this route, and restrict themselves to either a rap on the wrist through show-cause notices, or shut down the industries – making enforcement expensive and ineffective. Strengthening the ability of the PCBs to tackle point sources could provide a pathway to a broader reform process. India requires modern governance structures and the NCAP is largely silent on how this structure could look.

Some suggestions to strengthen regulatory capacities are:

• Increased resources of PCBs: Human resources currently available in PCBs are not sufficient to meet their mandate. There is a need to rapidly expand their capacity, particularly on the technical side. In the short term, existing vacancies in the CPCB need to be filled with qualified people. Working with CPCB and the states, filling up vacancies in the state PCBs should be another area of priority. Increased staff resources should translate to increased inspections and monitoring.
   
• Increased accountability through public disclosure of regulatory data: The operations of the PCBs are extremely opaque, and it is unclear to the public where the big polluting sources are, and whether they are compliant with regulatory norms. Ensuring that PCBs release regulatory information (details of consents granted, inspections, online monitoring data, enforcement actions, etc.) into the public, the domain would make the industries and state PCBs more accountable to local communities, civil society, and the media.
   
• Remove legal barriers for effective enforcement: There is a need for statutorily empowering PCBs so that they can initiate systematic and proportional responses to polluting activities. Amending the law to allow for a more diverse regulatory toolbox, which includes both existing powers and additional ones such as levying financial penalties would increase the flexibility of the PCBs and make them more responsive.

Conclusion
Air pollution is a complex problem, with multiple sources operating at different regional scales, under the jurisdictions of disparate agencies, and requiring a variety of mitigation measures. We need to unambiguously acknowledge the terrible impacts of air pollution on our health, move beyond the urban-centric approach, and tackle each of the big sources with a sense of urgency.

The policy for tackling air pollution needs to shift from the reactive approach we have taken so far to one that is more systematic:
focusing on some efforts in the near term, and beginning the process to reform our environment institutions to make them better resourced as well as more nimble and effective in the longer term.